Based on a True Story: Thinking About Talking About Watching “Zero Dark Thirty”

(1) Even before you see the movie it seems like you’ve seen it. This isn’t only because Mark Boal’s screenplay is so sparse—under 10,000 words, apparently—that almost all of its memorable lines and moments are in the previews, largely in chronological order. No. Before you’ve seen Zero Dark Thirty, it’s likely that you already have some knowledge of and feelings about the film, thanks to a wide-ranging debate about whether or not ZD30 endorses torture.

(2) “As a moral statement, Zero Dark Thirty is borderline fascistic. As a piece of cinema, it’s phenomenally gripping — an unholy masterwork. The first masterstroke is the first thing you see — or, rather, don’t see. Under a black screen, the sounds of 9/11 build: a hubbub of confusion, reports of a plane hitting the World Trade Center, and then, most terribly, the voice of a woman crying out to a 911 operator who tries vainly to assure her she’ll be okay. She won’t be. That prologue looks like restraint — there are no sensationalistic images — but it’s cruel: The recordings are genuine. You want revenge so much it hurts, but you’ll have to live with the pain because the ­sonovabitch bastard Muslims who killed that poor woman are elusive, and when you catch them they won’t talk. The next scene, a brutal interrogation at a CIA “black site,” is unpleasant but not unwelcome. To paraphrase Dick Cheney, you sometimes have to go to the dark side, and the big, bearded Dan (Jason Clarke) has made the trip…” – David Edelstein, New York.

(4) Kathryn Bigelow didn’t actually say that. She said something similar to it and I summarized it. I conflated her words into other words, to make her argument simpler and clearer. I’m actually owning up to that here. The creators of Zero Dark Thirty, Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow, do not do the same with their film. Instead, it begins with a title card saying that it’s Based On A True Story. “Just like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre!” I thought to myself.

(5) We live in a time inundated with “true” stories that are also “good” stories. Many of these stories turn out to not be true in the sense of factually accurate, even as their creators will claim that they are true in the sense of “getting to an emotional/personal/spiritual/political/etc. reality.” Ultimately, true can have a lot of meanings. So, it turns out, can good.

(6) Right after the title card, the film cuts to a black screen with audio of real phone calls from inside the towers on 9/11. Whatever emotional purpose this serves—I was in New York on 9/11, and was so horrified by this sequence I nearly left the theater—there’s a signaling purpose here. This Is Real, the phone calls attest. This Happened. In a way, the phone call sequence abrogates the hedging of “based on a true story.” It sets up a tacit contract that we’re getting at something close to the truth. This was only reinforced by the misguided and self-important pre-release decision on Boal and Bigelow’s part to portray the movie as somehow a just-the-facts-ma’am depiction of the hunt for Bin Laden derived from their exclusive “journalistic” access to people involved.

(7) I should probably just note here that several characters in ZD30, including its protagonist, are composites. In other words, they don’t exist and stand in for groups of people. This is in line with other Based On A True Story narratives, but also worth noting.

(8) It seems in ZD30’s case that the multiplex and not the newspaper is going to be the first draft of history. Many more people have already seen Zero Dark Thirty than will ever read Mark Bowden’s The Finish, an actual-nonfiction prose account of the same story. Does this increase the film’s obligation to get the facts right? Or is its higher obligation to be a compelling work of quality cinematic entertainment? Or art, for that matter? Without the pre-release interview blitz on Bigelow and Boal’s part, would this obligation have changed? What, in other words, is the value of the truth here?

(9)Creative Nonfiction, the genre of writing I largely work in, is an odd beast, engaging with complementary, occasionally competing, systems of worth. On one level, there’s the aesthetic worth of a particular work, and on the other there’s its truth value. The truth is a difficult beast. The work we create is both enhanced and restricted by it. Audiences and readers are far more forgiving of narrative structure issues (for example) in true stories because they are true, because on some level we recognize that fictional narratives are able to “cheat” in order to satisfy us. Works with a high level of truth value can often get away with being on some level aesthetically unsatisfying, while works that are exquisitely crafted are often able to elide some of the problems of the truth, be they gaps in memory, or conflicting accounts, or a baggy structure, or what have you. Part of what is at work with Zero Dark Thrity’s first five minutes and with Boal and Bigelow’s publicity tour is an attempt to sell you on the work’s truth value prior to your having any experience of its aesthetic one.

(10)Were it not for this, I do not believe the debate over the use of torture in the film would be occurring. Were the film about a CIA agent pursuing, say, Homeland’s Abu Nazir, with a 9/11-like terrorist attack in the first shot, I don’t think anyone would care, not really. More importantly, they wouldn’t be so sure that they were so sure about the film’s stance towards torture, as ZD30 isn’t nearly as cut and dry as everyone seems to be pretending it is.

(11)The case against torture—one I find persuasive, to be clear—rests on two arguments: morality and effectiveness. Simply put: Torture is wrong and it doesn’t work. These aren’t completely separate. While we’re all fond of the expression the ends don’t justify the means, the truth of the matter is we often make decisions about morality and ethics based on whether or not a specific end is worth a specific mean. So one of the reasons why torture is wrong is because it doesn’t work. The ends—shoddy intel, innocent people destroyed, the dehumanizing effect on the torturer, the cost to our moral standing etc.—aren’t worth whatever crumbs we’d get from torturing people. It’s helpful then to think about Zero Dark Thirty in terms of both of these standards. Does it portray torture as effective? And how does it portray it morally?

(12) The answer to the first question is complicated, but I believe that the movie has its thumb on the scale in favor of torture’s effectiveness.

(13) ZD30 is divided into roughly two halves, one about the CIA’s failure to find Bin Laden, and one about its success. The torture takes place entirely during the “failure” half of the film, and there are many moments in this half where it’s made at least tacitly clear that the CIA isn’t getting anywhere with torturing people. Also, the one piece of important intel—the name of Bin Laden’s courier—comes as the direct result not of torture but rather from an old interrogation room bluff: Jessica Chastain’s Maya and Jason Clarke’s Dan convince a detainee that he has already helped them and he gives them the name.

(14) It’s easy to point to this and say “see, the film is showing that old school law enforcement tactics work and torture doesn’t,” and, indeed, some have. The problem is that this bluff only works because the detainee has been waterboarded, starved, sleep deprived, beaten, walked around like a dog and shoved in a small wooden box until his short-term memory has disintegrated, allowing them to convince him that he has forgotten helping them. Later on, Maya interrogates a different detainee who says without prompting, “I don’t want to be tortured anymore, I’ll tell you whatever you want.” He provides no useful information, but he provides the next moment of narrative satisfaction to the audience, by intoning the ominous line “he is one of the disappeared ones.” Torture is thus narratively effective in the film regardless of how effective it is as an intel-gathering tool.

(15) Oh yeah, there’s also the glaring fact that torture did not, in real life, get us the name of the courier.

(16) “‘The film creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding Bin Laden,’ acting CIA Director Mike Morell wrote in a letter to employees in December. ‘That impression is false.’ The Senate intelligence committee, which last month completed a 6,000-page report on the CIA interrogation program based on its examination of 6 million pages of CIA records, was more definitive: ‘The CIA did not first learn about the existence of the UBL courier from CIA detainees subjected to coercive interrogation techniques. Nor did the CIA discover the courier’s identity from CIA detainees subjected to coercive techniques.’ Yet in their film, Bigelow and Boal depict the exact opposite.” – Adam Serwer, Mother Jones.

(17) “Torture may be morally wrong, and it may not be the best way to obtain information from detainees, but it played a role in America’s messy, decade-long pursuit of Osama bin Laden, and Zero Dark Thirty is right to portray that fact.” – Mark Bowden.

(18) The film also contains many moments where characters go to bat for the efficacy of torture and not one moment in which anyone repudiates it. This would be excusable by the dictates of realism (it’s doubtful CIA torturers would sit around talking about how it doesn’t work) were it not for the film’s inclusion of a scene where Mark Strong’s “George” argues that torture works to Stephen Dillane’s “National Security Advisor”—a guy who is fairly clearly based at least in part on White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, by reputation the most argumentative man alive—and NSA/Rahm doesn’t argue about it.

(19) Regardless of its view on torture’s effectiveness, there is the question of ZD30’s take on the morality of torture. And it is here that the movie is at its most troubling, if most interesting. For Zero Dark Thirty has absolutely no moral perspective on torture. It’s an essentially amoral film. It’s not immoral. It’s view towards torture is not, say, 24’s, where it always works and is always awesome and the people who get tortured deserve it. Nor is it, say, Man on Fire where torture is the hilariously over the top and necessary path that Denzel Washington must take to find Dakota Fanning.

(20) In Zero Dark Thirty, torture is simply shown, generally in a filmic style we associate with “objectivity”: no underscoring, documentary-like cutting and camera movement, few POV shots, etc. Much has been made of a few quick shots of Maya wincing, folding her arms, or otherwise seeming to disapprove of the interrogation she’s seeing. Yet, given that we later learn that in these first scenes she is at most 22 years old, and given that eventually she embraces torture, these moments can also be read as the squeamishness of the Rookie Cop who is about to become the Lone Crusader Who Works To Buck The System, Jimmy McNulty with better bone structure.

(21) Does Zero Dark Thirty have some kind of obligation—moral, political, ethical—to take a stance on torture, to be a “good” story in a moral sense? How would we treat a mainstream Oscar-nominated thriller that treated the Holocaust or slavery in a similarly “objective” and amoral way? Or a film that did the same with rape? Why doesn’t torture, a very recent part of our history that is still being debated, belong in this group?

(22) Ultimately, these questions are far more interesting than the film itself, which may be why the debate over torture has obscured discussion of the actual film. The script, alas, is a clunker, filled with tin-eared lines, containing characters that lack even one dimension, and riddled with clichés, while the acting—particularly the dialect work from the film’s many British actors—is deeply uneven.

(23) Despite this, the film has a power, thanks in part to Kathryn Bigelow. Zero Dark Thirty is expertly, even brilliantly, directed. Each sequence in it is riveting in its construction as Bigelow uses her keen sense of color, light and rhythm to pull the audience through the film’s decade-long story. Its second source of power is, of course, that it is true. Or rather true-ish. Or truthy. From the moment those phone calls start in, you can’t help but think that everything they’re showing you really happened, even when a part of you screams that it didn’t. This is Zero Dark Thirty’s trick, and it’s a good one. It can justify its weaknesses through claiming a level of access to the people involved in the story that you the viewer will never, can never, have, while also changing things when necessary for the sake of being a good story. The end result is something neither particularly true nor particularly good that somehow feels like both. And if feeling is a kind of truth, maybe, at the end of the day, it is both of these things.

113 Comments

I haven’t seen ZDT yet (and don’t really have much desire to see it), but I think it’s interesting that torture and realness — or more broadly, violence and realness — so often go together and reinforce each other. So…I sort of wonder if the flat depiction of torture is in part there for the same reason as the 9/11 recordings. Both make the film more real and therefore more good.

I think that’s maybe true in public discourse as well. Embracing torture is embracing realism, which makes those who torture more moral.

Oh yeah, I don’t agree with David Edelstein. I was going to go into that at length but i was up against 2000K words and so I thought i’d just put it in there because it was the review that started the debate.

I don’t know what movie Edelstein was watching, but I think he’s actually performing what he thinks the average viewer will feel instead of articulating his real views and the use of 2nd person in the paragraph is the tell. I could be wrong, but that’s how that paragraph feels. He both overestimates its aesthetic worth and its politics, I’d say.

Yeah, if you want fascist, watch Homeland. It puts across the notion that all of this below democratic control behavior is really safe and decent, because, for all their commitment to doing what has to be done, CIA assassins and the like will do the right thing, disobey orders, even threaten to kill corrupt leaders when morally necessary. Fear not, they have the same liberal beliefs as everyone else. Realpolitiks ultimately serves not expediency, but universal virtues.

There’s too much handwringing and not enough chins out and chests puffed up for Zero Dark Thirty to be effectively fascist. Maybe that’s Bigelow’s feminine touch at work.

Re #18, I remember that scene a little differently (or maybe I am thinking of a different one.). I recall one of the Bush-era operatives complaining that they couldn’t get better intel now that Obama had shut down the “detainee program.” Dillane tells them they have to find another way – and having been told that, they do find another way (using old fashioned deductive reasoning). I read that sequence as having a gentle but real anti-torture tone. It uses the plot, rather than the characters to argue against the necessity of torture.

That said, I find #17 infuriating. Boal has made similar comments, while mentioning that he thinks torture is wrong. They are (apparently willfully) misunderstanding the criticism. No one is arguing ZDT is wrong to depict torture. The criticism is #16. And I haven’t seen the filmmakers anywhere defend that choice. (Bowden actually disputes the accuracy of #15 and 16, which is a different argument to make.)

Noah – When I sent my last post via my iPhone, I happened to be sitting in the First Amendment section of the Newseum in Washington, D.C.

For those who are unfamiliar with the Newseum, it’s the journalistic profession’s privately-run equivalent to the Smithsonian, chronicling the history and evolution of journalism.

The Newseum’s First Amendment section reflects on five key parts: Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the right to assembly, and the right to petition.

Not too far from where I was sitting was a world map, broken down by country, and it was color-coded red, green and yellow, depending of the level of free press in a given country. Unfortunately, less than a quarter of countries have a free press, and the United States is one of the lucky ones that does.

And not too far from that world map was a shrine and hundreds of photos and names of journalists who were killed in their line of duty.

All of this being said, and being a bit of a journalist myself, I think I was in a pretty cool and objective mindset regarding David Edelstein’s “borderline fascistic” essay statement about ODT.

The bottom line? ODT is no cinematic “Mein Kampf.” It’s not even close.

Edelstein was just being a reactive whiner because the film did not treat the depiction of all of the military and intelligence people in the film with utter contempt and derision.

Anyhoo, 19-21 struck me the most. (All posts should have numbered paragraphs!). Disclosure: I haven’t seen the film, so what I’m saying is only based on second-hand accounts.

“Regardless of its view on torture’s effectiveness, there is the question of ZD30’s take on the morality of torture. And it is here that the movie is at its most troubling, if most interesting. For Zero Dark Thirty has absolutely no moral perspective on torture. It’s an essentially amoral film.”

To call it amoral doesn’t sound quite right.

Some utilitarians think that it’s in principle an open question whether it’s ever morally permissible to torture. Some think that, on an occasion where (a) torture would provide genuine information, (b) the information in question would help avert a sufficiently big catastrophe, (c) the only way to get the info is by torture, (d) the torture would have no indirect negative effects other than the obvious and serious direct effect on the victim, and (e) the potential torturer knows (a)-(d), or has very good reason to believe they are true, then it’s permissible, perhaps even obligatory, to torture.

(Now, Noah, before you sound off on the arrogance of utilitarianism and the Enlightenment, and how awesome Stanley Hauerwas is, or whatever, please bear in mind that by no means all utilitarians would agree to this)

For such utilitarians — let’s call them t-utilitarians, for “torture utilitarians” — it’s not the case that there are two arguments against torture, effectiveness and morality. Rather, these arguments are the same; if torture is morally wrong, it’s because it’s ineffective (or, if effective, wrong because it causes more harm than good).

So, for a t-utilitarian, if the film presents a situation where (a)-(e) hold — and it sounds like it does — then the film is actually presenting the torture as morally justified, albeit without overt emotional cues in the depiction.

The second point is that, if (f) the film does indeed present torture as sometimes morally justified, and (g) is likely to create that impression in viewers’ minds, and (h) this would make people more accepting of torture, and so torture more likely to recur, but (i) in fact, the film is incorrect and torture is morally wrong, then the film itself would be immoral, or, perhaps we would better say, it was immoral to create and distribute the film.

Your description of the film’s naturalistic presentation made me think of Gus van Sant’s film about the Colombine shootings, Elephant. That also presents the shootings naturalistically, and without any directorial editorialising. But no one’s troubled about it, or worried that it shows that it’s okay to shoot and kill a bunch of high school kids. And that’s, presumably, because there’s no open question here, and van Sant doesn’t go on to show all the good things that come about because of the shootings.

Stanley Hauerwas is awesome…but I was also already aware that lots of utilitarians and/or pragmatists think torture is wrong. The President does, for example (or says he does, anyway.)

I think the thing about torture that I haven’t seen a lot of in reference to ZDT is the extent to which it’s kind of a genre default. That is…showing good guys torturing bad guys to get information (or roughing them up or whatever) happens all the time in superhero comics, in action/adventure narratives, in police procedurals — it’s just all over the place. So…in some sense, I think, ZDT’s realism maybe trips it up? That is, the insistence on it’s realism is what makes the genre defaults stand out/become objectionable. The real makes it worse, not better.

Of course, that static also makes people view the film as serious, and/or talk about it at all. And any publicity is good publicity….

I think Isaac’s line about being in New York does indicate that you do need to be an American to truly appreciate where this movie is coming from. It’s largely based on technical merits that I prefer ZD30 to Argo but I have no interest in watching either of these movies ever again. The inordinate amounts of praise these two films and Homeland have received is an accurate (and I suppose mildly disturbing) barometer of the American psyche. I say mildly, because it *really* only matters if you’re living in the wrong part of the world (which I’m not). I sort of wonder how these two films will be viewed in 75-100 years time when America may not be the sole hegemonic power and other narratives come more prominently to the fore in the English language.

“Apart from the queasiness from the opening “enhanced interrogation” scene (more on that in a minute), there was the letdown purely on the detective-movie fanboy level I got from the fact that the “heroes” got their key information from torture. It was like watching a fishing show where the host throws dynamite in the lake to get the bass. In all the detective films and books I grew up watching and reading, the meathead cop who uses the third degree is always the villain – or if not the bad guy exactly, the sap, the klutz, who screws things up by swinging a fist when just talking would have worked fine.

In classic detective tales, the thug interrogator is even sometimes introduced as a parallel character to the hero, to show how things aren’t done – think the Victory Motel scenes in L.A. Confidential, or the cops in Raymond Chandler’s novels.”

There’s this perfect example of a film that I can’t remember the title of. I believe it features Richard Conte as a baker who’s suspected of being a master criminal and murderer by a police chief. The baker has a short fuse that’s landed in him jail before, but he now has the love of a good wife, neighbors and friends. The chief uses really extreme methods to investigate the baker (torture, illegal wire tapping, just about everything cops aren’t supposed to do) until it all blows up in his face and he’s thrown out of the force, a complete disgrace. The guy doesn’t give up. He continues to haunt the baker, oppress him at every turn, until it turns out the baker really is a murdering criminal boss.

Damn, I wish I could remember what movie that is …

Another similar theme is My Son John, where this poor effete intellectual from a small town has managed to escape the small-minded beliefs of his oppressively religious father only to be unjustly hounded by the FBI for no evidence whatsoever other than he’s obviously gay and an intellectual. The whole film seems like an attack on the oppressive methods of J. Edgar and stuff like 24 until the guy begins to feel guilty for actually being a communist. It’s a real humdinger made by Leo McCarey, a real ideological moron who’s become a favorite of current film critics for some reason.

And then there’s ready at hand go-to favorite for this sort of thing: Dirty Harry.

In other words, there’s plenty of justification for extreme measures in crime and police films from Hollywood’s past. So much so, that the films don’t even bother making a reasonable, narrative case for it. The ends justify the means by pure accident, supported by the irrational intuition of someone in power who appears insane until the very end. This is also the approach used in Homeland, the main character of which is actually insane who’s crazed bipolar insights turn out to always be right, even though she can’t prove a damn thing until the stupid villain puts something on YouTube or wherever.

James Baldwin writes about My Son John in his long essay “The Devil Finds Work.” He interweaves it with discussions of his own experiences with the FBI and police. It’s pretty spectacular (and I’m sure better than the film by a lot.)

This stuff always happens in superhero narratives too, of course. There’s that one scene in Miller’s Dark Knight where he drags the guy to the top of a building and hangs him headfirst over the city to interrogate him. That’s a bit extreme, but I think indicative of the general approach. Which makes sense, really; if you’ve already got vigilantes operating outside the law unilaterally deciding to beat people up/inflict concussions without due process, it’s hard to see how you’d really draw the line at physical threats, or even physical torture.

Well, with superheroes, you know, there’s torture and then there’s torture. Curiously, of the three characters who appear to be the moral compass in DC and Marvel comics — Superman, Spider-Man and Captain America — it’s hard to imagine any of them torturing anyone to get intel. But, of course, beating the shit out of people for other purposes is quite all right.

“The ends justify the means by pure accident, supported by the irrational intuition of someone in power who appears insane until the very end”

This kind of thing drives me nuts in art, and real life too, for that matter. You don’t get a pass just because your “hunch”, founded on nothing rational whatsoever, turns out to have been right — what you did was still stupid and irresponsible.

What drives me nuts in real life is that the idiots who have inflicted torture and/or invaded sovereign nations and killed thousands and tens of thousands on an irrational hunch and then been proved wrong still somehow suffer no consequences, and effectively get a pass and a sinecure on the Washington Post op-ed page.

State terrorism is punished only if the terrorists fall from grace politically or lose a war (which, of course, is the same thing). To the small fish there’s the “following orders” excuse. If they’re on the winning side three things may happen: 1) they weren’t really following orders; 2) they come in dandy as scapegoats; 2) they get away with it. God help them if they’re on the losing side and the winning side has no use for them.

But we did lose that war, and those people aren’t in political favor (they’re actually politically toxic) but we decided that “moving on” was more important. Which is, you know, awful.

I think between Cheney living a free man into his dotage and Jonah Lehrer being paid $20,000 to apologize it’s become abundantly clear that once you become a member of certain elite circles, it is literally impossible to fail.

An interesting treatment of the issue of torture and vigilantism and ethics is taking place right now in the second season of Young Justice, a DC cartoon series about side-kicks banding together to form a junior justice league. The plot is too complicated to explain here, but in the second season, they’re trying to tackle the issue of enhanced interrogation and the ends vs. the means within the context of a kids’ show.

Actually, I think this is an interesting argument. I don’t buy it, but I think it’s interesting. I reacted too quickly to it on Facebook and edited my comment, which I’ll post here:

There’s a lot of this kind of “well, if you watch it in this super-secret way with the right decoder ring on a full moon and/or watch it backwards with the sound running forwards, you will see that it it is actually…” kind of arguments, and I find them a bit tiresome. The film shows certain things, does not show others, and creates certain logical relationships through the order in which they are shown. While Edelstein, Greenwald and Taibii are over the top in their assertions about the film’s endorsement of torture (I think it tacitly endorses torture’s effectiveness sorta), they are still responding to what the film actually shows and the connections it draws between torturing a character until his mind falls apart and that character’s decision to give up a valuable piece of intel and that can’t really be explained away.

I like the discussion of gender within the film, tho, even if it gives the screenplay (which is terrible) way too much credit. Maya is essentially a void in the film, which would be an interesting comment on the dehumanization necessary to find Bin Laden were it not for the fact that every one else is essentially a void in the film too. Some people are delineated by getting things like southern accents that their actors cannot do that disappear and reappear through the film willy-nilly, but that’s about as far as the movie goes for “characterization.”

Jason is right that there are a lot of fascinating ambiguities within the film, and it refuses to go for jingoism or football-spiking. All of these make the film more interesting to talk about than to actually watch.

I still think The Grey is the best mainstream picture of the year, for what it’s worth.

I love how politics frame who, in the previous conversations, is considered good and evil.

The fact is, in modern political history (which I would peg at post-World War I), when it comes to military action, the folks who are evil are the ones who intentionally or indiscriminately seek to kill as many people as possible to make a land grab or abscond with another country’s resources.

Those who use military action to try and stop evil, but inadvertently kill noncombatants in the process, are good.

It’s really as simple as all that.

The problem with many intellectuals is they honestly believe the use of military action, under ANY circumstances, is evil. In fact, the more extreme intellectuals actually believe that if we abolished militaries, we would be able to eliminate evil entirely.

And while that sounds wonderfully utopian, it’s about as stupid an idea as advocating the abolition of police forces to eliminate crime.

Perhaps someday there will no longer be a need for militaries, but I sure don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Russ, Broadly, I would say that you are right that inadvertent killing is OK to prevent greater evil, greed based grabs are evil flat out.

But I also think there are additional gradations that come into play. Use of white phosphorus as a weapon (not smoke screen) on civilians counts as evil, to me. Torture, evil. Reckless spending of soldiers’ lives on unimportant strategic battles, also evil (as well as incompetent, obvs).

I do believe that force is an important political reality that we must fund, be willing to use, etc. HOWEVER.

I’ve also spent half my life living in a relatively violent part of town, and I am, well, not all that threatening (short, tiny women generally aren’t). So practically speaking, I have had to use pacifist tools to deal with the violent threats presented. There was no way I was going to be able to win a physical confrontation with a gun-toting drug dealer (not to mention the completely crazed meth addicts themselves….), but I also was not willing to just let them do whatever the heck they wanted.

I think it’s worth looking at those kinds of pacifist methods, because to me, avoiding the use of force when possible is the honorable thing, not only for the people upon whom one would employ that force, but also for the sake of those who would inflict it. JMO.

Noah — Unfortunately, when it comes to military action — good intentions is, in fact, the ONLY reliable discriminator between good and evil.

As I pointed out some message board many years ago, despite the fact I thought, for a number of reasons, invading Iraq was a bad idea, I can’t fault Bush, Cheney or anyone else for doing so based on the intelligence they were given.

The difference beteen you and I is that I’ve seen how frustratingly ambiguous actual classified intelligence reports are. In fact, we used to joke about how stupid the ambiguity was. The intel guys make covering their asses an art, so that no matter what decision a senior leader makes, if the operation fails badly, the intel guys always have wiggle room to say, “Well, we never said the intel was 100 percent certain.” It was really that comical sometimes.

ZDT actually addresses that fact — both the frustration of decision-makers who want 100 percent certainty, and the fact that almost to a person, the intel guys wouldn’t give it to them.

And that’s the way life in the intel world is. The chances are usually given as something like 60-40, or 80-20, but NEVER 100 percent.

That’s why, when I found out CIA director George Tenet told President Bush it was a “slam-dunk” there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I was honestly shocked he went out on a limb like that.

Domingos wrote: “Good intentions? It seems to me that Russ characterized USA’s foreign politics well when he mentioned “abscond with another country’s resources.”

I assume you are inferring U.S. invaded Iraq for its oil. If that was the case, then we failed miserably. After all was said and done, we didn’t abscond with Iraq’s oil. In fact, we poured hundreds of billions of dollars into a war where we got no resources in return. The only thing we got is a shaky alliance and we removed Saddam Hussein and his crazy sons from power.

One other thing regarding Tenet’s “slam-dunk” comment. Such a statement by someone from the intel community is so unusual, I still wonder if there was, in fact, a WMD program of some type in Iraq, and that we were just too slow and disorganized in the early weeks of the invasion to find before it was packed up and shipped elsewhere — say, Syria.

On the other hand, if Saddam himself couldn’t get out of Iraq, how could trucks carrying WMD equipment get out?

Then again, perhaps Saddam chose to initially stick around rather than escape.

Nope. Everybody has good intentions, Russ. Hitler had good intentions. He honestly believed that Jews were a plague, and that they should be exterminated for the good of the world. If you have no basis of morality other than good intentions, then who are you to criticize him? It turned out he was wrong, but maybe he was working with the best intel he had, right?

There’s plenty of evidence that the intelligence re Iraq was manipulated. We were not under anything like direct assault or threat in any case…and according to Just War principles, that means you shouldn’t go to war. I don’t see how you get to war from Niebuhrian pragmatism, either, since, like I said, there wasn’t a direct threat.

As for that, there were lots of people who said, early on, this is a horrible idea. So predicting the horrible outcome wasn’t exactly difficult or impossible. The people who said we shouldn’t have done it were right, those who said we should have were wrong. Saying that the folks in power tried as hard as they could just means they were incompetent. And once you’re talking about the deaths of tens of thousands of people, incompetence — not to mention lying — starts to be immoral, not just an accident.

Russ wrote:
“The problem with many intellectuals is they honestly believe the use of military action, under ANY circumstances, is evil. In fact, the more extreme intellectuals actually believe that if we abolished militaries, we would be able to eliminate evil entirely.”
What you’re describing is pacifism. Not all intellectuals are pacifist. Hell, most intellectuals are not pacifist (many neocons are intellectuals, academics even). And not all pacifists are intellectuals. Why conflate the two?

Not only are the vast majority of intellectuals not pacifist, but the majority of pacifists aren’t intellectuals. I’m pretty sure that for the most part people who have actual pacifist convictions are religious folks of one stripe or another whose pacifism is part of their faith primarily, not their education.

It’s interesting that we’ve slipped from torture to any and all violence. I can see why that happens, but perhaps it’s worth pointing out that, while there are some intellectually and morally coherent ways to approach the occasional use of violence, I don’t think the same can be said of torture. It’s pretty much condemned by everybody. Even people who defend torture usually do so by claiming that technique x is not torture, but is just “enhanced interrogation” or some Orwellian nonsense phrase.

Jones gave a morally coherent way to approach torture in an above post. (A weakness in Jason Michelitch’s article is that he seems completely ignorant of utilitarianism.) What’s the difference between dropping a bomb somewhere for purpose P and torturing someone for P, where P might be something like ending a war faster. It seems that many more people, even innocents, are likely to die by dropping a bomb. Is there a big difference between the practical use of torture and any other form of violence? … other than an argument about effectiveness, I mean. And, I just bet, that a real pacifist wouldn’t see a difference, either.

Actually, this isn’t clear. It’s prima facie plausible that people sometimes act in a way that they believe to be morally wrong, usually in favour of their own self-interest. Granted, people often manage to rationalise their self-interest so that, wow, what an amazing coincidence, the right thing to do turns out to be exactly the thing that I would want to do anyway. But there do seem to be other cases where, even though I believe that X is wrong, I go ahead and do it anyway. (But some philosophers do think appearances are misleading here and that, if I genuinely believed that X is wrong, then I would thereby be motivated not to do it)

Yeah…the thing is that just about everybody who knows anything about it will tell you that torture doesn’t work well. So that’s a big part of why the pragmatist argument isn’t coherent. There’s just no reason to think that torture is effective, so people arguing for it on pragmatist grounds are basically making shit up.

As this is a comics blog, putatively… has anyone mentioned the aesthetic parallels with post-Frank-Miller Batman media? I haven’t seen ZDT, but it sounds extremely titillating to my sadistic side, with just some distaste only arising at the attempt to justify sin with frantic phone calls, etc. Are we listening to Palestinians or Iraqis or Afghanis getting hurt?

Beside the point. Anyway, it sounds like a discussion about the politics of noir tragedy is worth having– the justification issue seems fairly irrelevant, at least to this movie.

Jones…hmm, well, I guess I can see that (with all your caveats.) Still, lots of people who did extremely evil things (Hitler, Lenin, Pol Pot, Jefferson Davies, and on and on) were pretty clearly acting in the way that they thought best.

Making morality about good intentions basically means you can’t condemn anyone without reading their mind…and since you can’t read anybody’s mind, then no one is evil. It quickly leads to extreme relativism, it seems to me. Which is sort of a depressing place to see conservatives heading towards….

Argh…sorry…but also, Jones, aren’t there a number of philosophies (capitalism, Nietzsche) in which one’s own self-interest is the ultimate good? (Or at least a good.) So the division you’re drawing there between self-interest and goodness isn’t always obvious — and someone could (and I believe people often do) act out of self interest to do horrible things while maintaining that acting on self-interest is ultimately in the best interest of everyone/society/what have you.

I think seeing Nietzsche as philosopher of self-interest doesn’t hold up. He’s a skeptic of reason, for example.

Jason just dismisses any possibility of utilitarianism sans argument:

“More importantly, any argument about torture’s effectiveness fails morally because it concedes the moral component of the argument right off the bat. The argument cannot be that we should not torture because it does not work. The argument must be that we should not torture because it is wrong.”

“Making morality about good intentions basically means you can’t condemn anyone without reading their mind…and since you can’t read anybody’s mind, then no one is evil.”

1) It’s as if one wants a moral theory that places more emphasis on one’s actions than one’s intentions, which…oh, hey, that’s what utilitarianism usually does. And the most influential (in Western philosophical ethics) anti-utilitarian view, viz. Kantian deontology, is based entirely on one’s intentions. Come over to the dark side, Noah, you know deep down you want to.

2) We read minds all the time; social interaction would be impossible without it. For instance, when you write something like “Making morality about good intentions basically means you can’t condemn anyone without reading their mind…and since you can’t read anybody’s mind, then no one is evil.”, I use my uncanny powers of mindreading to infer that you believe that making morality about good intentions basically means you can’t condemn anyone without reading their mind…and since you can’t read anybody’s mind, then no one is evil. Correct me if I’m wrong about your beliefs here.

To be sure, my mindreading powers, although uncanny, are defeasible and fallible, but what isn’t? We should be okay with a moral theory that gives us only fallible knowledge of right and wrong; if it’s arrogant of us to think that we have 100% apodeictic certainty about what other people are thinking, surely it’s, at the very least, no less arrogant to suppose that we have that degree of certainty about the moral structure of the universe.

Hmm. I guess I agree with Jones that if your morality is based on results, you’re a utilitarian. I think I will side with the deontologists and say that what Hitler wanted was bad. His bad actions were based on bad beliefs.

And if people torture people because they believe it will help people, then their beliefs are bad. And if they think watching or participating in violence isn’t purely it’s own pleasurable reward, but serves some higher end, their beliefs are bad.

I think it’s maybe possible to make moral judgments without reading people’s minds and yet without necessarily saying that the ends justifies the means in every case.

I agree that you can sometimes tell what people are thinking from what they say. The problem is, while you may be correct that not everyone acts out of good intentions, no political figure is ever going to say that they murdered a bunch of people out of self interest, or just for the hell of it. In issues of war or public policy, the people in authority always are going to claim good intentions. So then, to impute bad intentions, you’re going to have to do something a big more complicated than rephrasing a sentence. You’re going to have to argue that people are lying, or even that they don’t know what their real intentions are.

At some point, it seems like, you have to figure out not what George Bush thinks is good and evil, and not even what the universe thinks is good and evil (whatever that might mean), but what you yourself think is good and evil. Is it right to kill lots of people on the off chance that someday sometime in the future they might hurt you? Or, alternately, is that wrong? I’m not sure if it’s arrogant to ask those questions or to try to answer them…but it seems like if it is, then it’s the arrogance of trying to be a human being.

I don’t think that one has to claim 100% certainty about the moral structure of the universe, or even about one’s own stance — you seem to have been less careful than usual in sliding into that assumption? Either way, though, the question of whether Hitler’s intentions were good, or whether George W. Bush’s were, seems largely irrelevant. Surely the thing to question is their stated ideology, and to some extent, where it led them. Murdering 6 million people is bad whether you really think it’s the right thing to do or not; torturing people is wrong even if you really think waterboarding isn’t torture. And…the part that wouldn’t be utilitarian is that murdering 6 million people would be wrong even if you could convince yourself that you’d increase the happiness of the universe by doing so. Just as torture is wrong even if it’s effective, as Jason says in his article.

RE: Nietzsche…I guess the point is that he argues that the superman is beyond good and evil or morals or what have you. He’s not an especially systematic thinker, obviously, but I don’t think it’s crazy to see him at various points as saying that you should act without regard to morals because that is the higher morality. Doing what you are called to by your own inner whatever may not map exactly onto self interest, but it seems like it’s in that general direction.

Oh…and in terms of Kant. It’s been a long time since I read him, but I think he’s actually quite insightful about the internal experience of how morality feels, or what it feels like to struggle with moral issues. He seems a lot less convincing when he tries to go from that to generalized arguments about how to make moral choices. Or, to put it another way, evaluating intentions makes a lot of sense when you’re inside your own head and thinking about your own intentions. It becomes significantly less useful when you’re evaluating other people’s intentions.

Noah — Hitler’s “good intentions” were historically backwards. They may not have been out of place in Roman times, when scorched earth tactics, slavery, genocide and no respect for a weaker city state/empire was pretty much the norm worldwide. But by the time Hitler rose to power, the world had changed dramatically.

Even things that were perfectly acceptable for most major powers during the 1700s and 1800s had become “bad form” after the end of World War I. Folks like Hitler and Stalin weren’t doing “the right thing” by contemporary standards. They summarily rejected 700 years of post-Magna Carta individual rights developments and began emulating the Romans at their worst.

Thus, I would argue that “good intentions” and historical context are everything.

Unfortunately, there are still plenty of cultures even today whose “good intentions” are hundreds, or even thousands, of years behind the times.

The scary part is that some of these backwards cultures have access to technological power they probably shouldn’t.

Oh, I realize I should elaborate on what “bad beliefs” are. But I think the question is how do you differentiate between morality and making excuses for what feels good– utility seems tantamount to hedonism (I’m sure this view is a sub-strain of utilitarianism/ pragmatism), or, if you prefer, power. Nietzsche was repeatedly explicit about both power and pleasure being authentic motivations (although he also had a hhilarious quote about how only the English would imagine that happiness was the purpose of life).

Zizek likes to talk about how the brutal, draconian aspects of fascism are the cover/flipside of all the pleasurable violence– versus this he then posits a more true and universal politics, but I would be at a loss to say how you evaluate political (or moral) authenticity in human terms.

Zizek might or might not agree, but it seems like he appreciates the deep perversity of the Christian tradition as a key to its moral compass (what moral compass?, shout millions of souls, alive and dead– yes, I know)– love God (so, less idiomatically, the kernel of absolute Otherness within yourself) and your neighbor (the kernel of yourself in the cosmos), and then practice detachment, form loving beliefs and transcend your body in loving actions, etc. Ethics shmethics.

Hitler’s problem was not that he was historically backwards, for fuck’s sake. Besides the ridiculousness of pretending that what he did would have ever been okay, Nazism was absolutely, relentlessly modern.

You can try Kant’s because treating human beings as things is wrong, if you’d like, Charles. Also, I’d say, violence is only acceptable (at best) in duress, and against those who are a threat. Torturing a captive is automatically wrong because they aren’t a threat, and torturing them because somebody else is a threat turns them into a thing.

If they’re not a threat, why hold them? Okay, so let’s acknowledge that the prisoner (if justifiably being detained) is a threat and that detention is way of decreasing his threat. But isn’t that the ostensible purpose of torture (granting it’s not for perverse pleasure or whatever), to decrease a threat? One might argue that it’s no more effective than mere detention, that it won’t give you any more useful answers than simply asking the guy questions or not asking at all, but that’s not an argument available to you (or Jason). And if the prisoner knows something about a violent attack on your country, isn’t he part of the threat?

As for means, isn’t dropping a bomb on another person treating that person as a means? Maybe not if he willingly chose his status as your enemy (by holding a different goal to yours, he puts himself in a position where you have to treat him as means — and vice versa), but that would also apply to torturing the guy for info he has about a cause he supports.

I don’t know, I have a hard time seeing torture as some special, really bad form of violence, regardless of its usefulness. The best argument against it is that it’s useless violence that doesn’t add anything to the violence that’s arguably necessary.

But maybe there’s some great essay out there that I just don’t know about …

“Unfortunately, there are still plenty of cultures even today whose “good intentions” are hundreds, or even thousands, of years behind the times.
OK, I’m not a complete cultural relativist, but who gets to decide whose times are “the times?”
Am I reading you wrong, or are you suggesting that Western Europeans can be trusted with technologies of mass destruction because we’ve reached some moral level that other cultures have yet to attain? Look, I don’t think North Korea or Iran should have nuclear weapons, but that’s got everything to do with the people running the country and not the culture writ general.

1. It seems strange that reporter Mark Bowden’s equivocation on the film gets a separate aragraph, while factual objections by CIA Director Mike Morell and the Senate intelligence committee are combined in one. Which implies Bowden has equal weight (intentionally or not).

2. Bowden’s quote comes from an essay in which he says “We ought to feel betrayed only when filmmakers depart egregiously and deliberately from the record” Which is what Zero Dark Thirty does in depicting torture, even if Bowden downplays it. His point that torture “played a role” does not equal “played the role as presented in the film”.

3. One context for Bowden’s essay is he has his own Bin Laden killing book to sell. Another context: In 2012 Bowden was harshly criticized about fudging details for dramatic effect in a Vanity Fair article. His essay about Zero Dark Thirty came after this semi-scandal.

4. I will admit, I tend to equate “creative non-fiction” with bullshitting. The phrase seems like essayists putting on airs, and a blanket fudge or escape clause.

3. Non-fiction has a variety of forms with varying factual requirements. Avoiding bullshit, however, isn’t as hard as many creative non-fictional essays pretend. It means acknowledging people buy into your stuff on the presumption of veracity and being responsible and open about the limits of accuracy. Also: not making shit up.

4. I must admit I’m still a fan of David Sedaris even though he never openly addresses the limits of his work. I’d argue it’s implied in his persona.

5. I’m also weary when creative non-fiction sorts respond to every instance of exposed dishonesty or fraud with “what is truth?”

6. Today, Feb 22, the NYT published an essay by Ali H Soufan, a former F.B.I. special agent who interrogated Qaeda detainees. He says “As a movie, I enjoyed it. As history, it’s bunk.” Which strikes me as a far more cogent argument than Bowden’s.

7. This essay is okay, invocation of creative non-fiction aside, it does seem to fudge things a bit, in particular that Bowden bit.

8. Bunk is often used as a sanitized way of saying “bullshit”.

9. I think bullshit is an important concept in critical theory (see Harry Frankfurt’s essay).

10. In Frankfurt’s definition, the bullshitter “does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose”. Which accurately describes Zero Dark Thirty. It is meant to give the feeling of “based on a true story”, but the statements of informed observers and evasions of the filmmakers themselves indicate the “based on” is a clause for bullshit.

11. These days calling bullshit seems achingly sincere and presumptive, invoking a moral authority both dubious and unearned. But bullshit can be nothing but the failure to be internally consistent. A somewhat longer and stronger disclaimer at the front of Zero Dark Thirty would have been more responsible with minimal sacrifice of dramatic effect as any caveat fades in the mind as a film progresses.

11. A side note: Every aspect of this movie was a decision made by someone. Discussing truth and fiction tends to depersonalize the process as if Hollywood inaccuracies was some natural force which hit this movie. Bigelow and Boal made a choice about every scene, considering the impact and meaning. They decided it was okay to arrange events in the film so evidence which had not been produced by torture were presented as if they were results. They could have arranged the scenes in a more accurate way. Their replies indicate they were well aware such choices have an impact on meaning. Artists always have agency, moral and otherwise, and in this particular case they were clearly conscious of it. So I think they have knowing responsibility for the problems.

It’s surprising to me that you came away from reading this post thinking in some way I was approving– or bending the essay to approve– of what Mark Bowden wrote. I say, amongst other things, that the film has its thumb on the scale in favor of the efficacy of torture, and that it is both untrue and ungood at the end. That the essay contains viewpoints contrary to mine doesn’t mean I endorse them. The film had kicked off a big debate and I tried to capture some of it, or at least the points i found interesting.

As to your thoughts on creative nonfiction… it seems that you’re not really familiar with what the term means and are thus reading “creative” to mean “gives one a license to make stuff up.” If you are curious at to how the term is treated by those who actually work in the field, you could do worse than to start here:https://www.creativenonfiction.org/what-is-creative-nonfiction

There’s also a great essay by Dinty Moore called “What’s So Creative About Creative Nonfiction?” but it is, alas, not freely available.

While there are, indeed, some CNF writers who play fast and loose with the facts or– in John D’Agata’s case, assert they don’t matter– they hold a minority position in the field and are widely condemned. The “creative” part of creative nonfiction is not the what of story, but rather the how of telling. Which actually becomes much more of a challenge when you can’t change the “what.” In ZD30’s case, they change the “what” all over the place. But ZD30 is also not really a work of creative nonfiction. It’s closer to “nonfiction novels” like “In Cold Blood.”

What was shocking about Hitler wasn’t some atavistic Roman plundering but a that he treated middle class and peasant Jews and Slavs in densely populated Europe like Europeans had heretofore only treated natives of other continents.

I think, yes, all violence violates Kant’s dictum to some degree. The argument for violence in a Just War setting, again, is basically that you defend yourself when attacked. In Just War theory (as I understand it, at least) there’s really not a place to just attack people because you think they might threaten you, or because on balance it might help you out.

A person who is held in prison or captured is by definition not a direct threat. By the same token, you can’t just shoot prisoners in the head because you feel like it and it would be more convenient not to have to guard them.

Basically, there are moral systems short of pacifism where you aren’t just pragmatically weighing outcomes and deciding to kill people based on what you think will result in the best outcome. You can see violence as a last resort in specific situations, but not then decide that any violence against anyone is okay as long as on balance you think it might result in the best outcome, however defined.

And part of the basis for this kind of thinking, incidentally, is the fact that you really are not able to predict the future. Using future predictions (x will happen if we do not get this information) as justification for any level of violence or cruelty is, I’d argue, the particular moral bugaboo of modernity. It’s liberalism’s bleak shadow.

Ormur, I don’t think that’s exactly correct. Remember Europe had already been through World War I; they weren’t strangers to atrocity. In addition, the Communists had already done really incredibly horrible things in Eastern Europe. The Holomodor was different than the Holocaust, but once you get to that scale of suffering saying it was worse or better starts to become pretty meaningless.

I’d agree Hitler wasn’t a throwback. But that’s not just because it was in Europe. It’s because of the widespread use of modern technology to streamline and accomplish the killings. The Nazi’s also used technology and modern state apparatus to broadcast ideology and seek out dissent in new ways (or at least in ways arguably pioneered by the Communists relatively recently.) It’s also because Hitler’s ideology was modern; the anti-Semitism of the Nazis was racialized in a way that made it significantly different from old-fashioned Christian anti-Semitism.

Basically, the fallacy is in thinking that some people are ahead of their time and some people are behind. That’s just never true. The time is what it is, and everyone is here now. Radical Islam isn’t backwards looking; on the contrary, it’s radicalism is very much about the modern Middle East and imperialism; it’s anti-Western edge is about the modern history of the region, not about refusing to move with the times.

Pretending that other folks are recalcitrant or behind the times is foolish both in that it flatters us unduly and in that it makes it really difficult for us to understand why other countries do what they do.

Here in Chicago, lawyers have been working for years to get prisoners released (not enemy combatants, I’ll grant) whose false confessions were extracted using torture. Did it have a beneficial effect on the neighborhoods where the prisoners lived and on relations with the police? Probably you can guess. Violence served itself. Dominance was enforced. The question is, does illuminating this incidence of torture not just move something else into darkness?

The coin-flip I’d like to point out is that between codified ethics and pragmatism. If you make all decisions based on maximum gains in moral piety or some notion of gross community benefit, you’re not dealing with the “state of exception,” the thing-ness that Noah talked about that makes a person a slave. Our property laws, based on Roman property laws, are fundamentally based on that person-to-thing relationship.

Charles, if you have to ask how torture is different from everything else, there’s no point telling you. To paraphrase Anscombe, “if someone really thinks, in advance, that it is open to question whether [in this instance, torture] should be quite excluded from consideration—I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind.”

Jones…I just presented several arguments why torture is different — not from everything else, but from acceptable violence. Bert’s presented some too.

Anyway, one more time — I don’t think torture is different from, for example, invading Iraq. I think it’s pretty similar to invading Iraq, actually. My point is simply that you don’t need to be an out and out pacifist to believe that certain kinds of violence are wrong, and torture falls in that category.

It’s similar to targeting civilians, I think. The US did that in WW II — most notably with the nuclear bomb attacks. The argument (somewhat post hoc, but still) was that more Americans would die in an invasion, therefore you could basically kill as many Japanese noncombatants as you wanted up to the number of Americans who you thought would maybe die. That’s utilitarian thinking, and I think it’s wrong for the same reason torturing people is wrong — that being, (a) using the future as an excuse to murder people in the present basically gives you carte blanche to indulge in violence of any sort; (b) combatants and noncombatants are supposed to be treated differently, again as a matter of Just War doctrine, which is to say, as a way to put brakes on violence, and make sure that it is subordinate to justice and peace.

The pro-torture pragmatist argument is actually closer to pacifism than to Just War doctrine, in a lot of ways. The argument is that there can be no brakes on violence; that you cannot subordinate it; that once you have chosen violence, anything and everything is acceptable. So, by the logic of your argument, not just waterboarding would be acceptable, but, say, tearing off prisoner’s eyelids, or cutting out their tongues, or for that matter cutting off their genitals, or raping them, or stabbing out their children’s eyes in front of them, or killing their whole families, or making them to watch as you drop a nuclear bomb on their homes. Right? If you need to get them to talk to save the future, what isn’t allowable in the present? If you’re against rape, or mutilation, or killing family members, then you’re just weak minded and/or not thinking clearly, right?

This isn’t a slippery slope argument. It’s an argument that the logic is the same for waterboarding as for other forms of torture. Yet, those other forms of torture are anathema to pretty much everybody. That’s because just about everybody has a sense that there are some things you should not do in the name of expedience, in part for the reasons I’ve stated, in part because, as Bert says, the kind of community we want to be is one in which peace and justice, and not just bean counting at the apocalypse, are honored.

Just to be clear; it’s not a slippery slope argument because nobody actually follows utilitarian logic all the way through, nor are they likely to. Even folks who make those arguments tend to actually refer to community standards and tradition and empathy when they make moral decisions. That’s why people who argue for torture have to pretend it isn’t torture. That’s not a weak-minded bowing to unrigorous thinking — it’s the compliment vice pays to virtue.

The differences with torture are twofold. There’s two parts. 1) Torture is suffering, pure and simple. Death itself is not necessarily suffering, but torture absolutely is. If you shoot a solider in the head, the actual suffering is fairly limited. Of course there are ways to kill people with extra suffering (such as white phosphorus, aka, burning people alive) and this is why a lot of those methods are banned by various conventions.

2) (and I’m sure I’ll get pushback on this one, but whatever) There is nothing humans learn to love so much as torturing other humans. It is an intensely self-reinforcing behavior. Torturers become addicted to the practice and carry it home. Then it spreads like the petals of an ugly flower, infecting everything in its path. From overseas to police forces, from police forces to home, from home to home, and back again across other areas, spreading fear and pain and suffering.

What if you step outside of the honor code for a minute? What if the 9/1 phone calls and the torture are actually not provocation-response but just the same, undifferentiated except in the trivial details of whose hands the blood is on?

Of course it was a simplification and I didn’t mean to imply that what Stalin did wasn’t shocking either. WWI was a horrible shock too but in a different way, the laws of war were still pretty much upheld. The parallels between Hitler and Stalin and the treatment of Africans, Native Americans and Aborigines are clearer in my view. Hitler was very much aware of how Americans conquered their own lebensraum and the German Empire had already committed genocide in Africa. Of course it’s going to take on a different character though when doing the same to your densely populated farming and city dwelling neighbor. So, I mean the Holocaust certainly has unique characteristics but ties into a wider history of modern Western violence.

But that’s just to stress that I agree with you in that it wasn’t actually a relic of that past, just as you point out with Islamic radicalism too.

Jones and Charles. Patting yourselves on the backs for your clear-eyed rationality because no one is presenting arguments looks weird when you’ve got all these people presenting arguments. It calls into question the clear-eyed rationality, at the least.

Regarding the future, “I’m going to kill your entire family, member by member, until you tell me when the servants of Uzak are planning on attacking from their global space station” isn’t quite the same as “Tell me when the next terrorist event is coming from your cell.”

As for combatants vs. noncombatants, there’s also something like Ward Churchill’s position on “little Eichmanns.” It’s a version of “collateral damage.”

Ormur, that makes sense. And yes, I did know that Hitler was inspired by the Native American genocide. It’s as if violence isn’t so much a choice as a tradition, which we adopt as our own at our peril….

Utility isn’t much of a brake. And I don’t think it’s conceived as a brake. It’s a way to just treat violence as a tool, which you can use without much or any fear that it may use you. You put in the calculus and you take out as much violence as you (or some state agent) needs. Neat, easy, rational.

You’re further point seems really like a non-answer. What is the difference, besides the hand waving about space station? Torture has often been used against family members. This isn’t a crazy hypothetical here; this is something that really happens and has happened. If you have captured a man who might be a terrorist, and also have access to his infant son (which is not a crazy or impossible thing to happen), and you believe that the terrorist has information which will save, say, thousands, including innocent women and children, on what basis can you argue against dismembering that infant in front of him in order to get him to talk? One infant is less important than many infants, right? Collateral damage happens; infants get killed all the time in bomb blasts. Are you a tough minded realist, or are you a shirking, shilly-shallying pacifist? Are you going to dismember that baby or not?

And if not, please explain to me, consistent with your strong-minded principles, why you wouldn’t.

And for pity’s sake, to defend the use of torture you go to Ward Churchill in order to assert that the World Trade Center victims deserved what they got?

Everybody has some blood on their hands, it’s true. But, as Gandalf I believe puts it, some who live deserve death, and some who died deserve life. If you decide you’re the one who gets to pick and choose, then you might as well just hand the ring over to Sauron now.

Ha ha, I knew using the Anscombe quote would piss y’all off. If I could have done our mutual aren’t-we-tough-minded high-fiving and back-slapping just as an aside to Charles, I would have. So, sorry, everyone. Please bear in mind that anything I say is meant as good-humouredly as is possible given the serious issue at stake. It’s just that the only arguments I’ve ever seen against torture have been either utilitarian arguments, with which I agree, or arguments whose fundamental appeal I do not see (such as an appeal to the doctrine of double effect to distinguish torture from other, “permissible” forms of violence).

(That said, Charles: aren’t we’re the greatest?)

It is indeed a defining feature of utilitarianism that no actions are intrinsically wrong, but only wrong by virtue of their consequences; it is, indeed, the defining feature.

It is not a necessary feature of utilitarianism that torture is therefore morally permissible under any conditions in which any actual human being finds herself or is ever going to find herself. It is not a necessary feature of utilitarianism that people should actually try to go through a utilitarian calculus before deciding whether to torture. It is not even a necessary feature of utilitarianism that it’s morally permissible to even discuss in public whether torture is morally permissible.

(Anecdote: I visited various grad schools in 2003 as a prospective student, and was completely unsettled when some NYU students were debating, over dinner, whether torture could be permissible, in the context of the “war of terror”. It’s also a question often used in intro ethics class, the proverbial “ticking time bomb” scenario. I think that both of these are morally corrosive, in the sense that they make it more likely that torture will occur in the actual circumstances that people will find themselves in, i.e. where torture is morally wrong. No one is ever in a ticking time bomb scenario.)

Some utilitarians are t-utilitarians, some are not. I happen to fall into the latter camp, and that’s because torture is wrong. Charles might be a t-utilitarian, I don’t know.

Many of the arguments that have been proffered here have been utilitarian (or, strictly speaking, consequentialist — but the consequences in question seem to be ones for some notion or other of utility). e.g.

“(a) using the future as an excuse to murder people in the present basically gives you carte blanche to indulge in violence of any sort; (b) combatants and noncombatants are supposed to be treated differently, again as a matter of Just War doctrine, which is to say, as a way to put brakes on violence,”

i.e. if you use utilitarian justifications for certain kinds of violence, that will have as a consequence that that kind of violence or even worse will reign unchecked, which is a bad consequence. A sentiment with which I 100% agree.

or

“[torture] is an intensely self-reinforcing behavior. Torturers become addicted to the practice and carry it home. Then it spreads like the petals of an ugly flower, infecting everything in its path. From overseas to police forces, from police forces to home, from home to home, and back again across other areas, spreading fear and pain and suffering”.

A sentiment with which I also 100% agree and which is why I, too, like all you right-minded, non-genocidal, non-it’s-okay-to-mutilate-children, we’re-against-evil, fuck-you-Hitler-loving-utilitarian-scumbag folks, believe that torture is wrong. I also believe that most wars are wrong, and that, even within wars that are morally permissible (presumably only on one side of the conflict!) — if there are any such wars — very, very many of the things that combatants and their governments do are wrong. Enough of them, in fact, that it sets the bar for permissible wars very high.

I further believe that it’s irrelevant whether waterboarding is described as torture, because it’s wrong whatever we call it, for much the same utilitarian reasons that you’ve been kind enough to offer. The reason people try to redefine torture so that waterboarding or, to use the revolting euphemism, other “enhanced interrogation techniques”, do not count as torture is precisely because they are not appealing to any kind of utilitarian principle. (At least when they’re busy trying to redefine it; in general, yes, the pro-torture brigade runs both lines of argument, but both lines are mistaken). Utilitarians don’t care what you call an action, and that’s precisely because the consequences are the same either way (ceteris paribus).

“Ha ha, I knew using the Anscombe quote would piss y’all off. If I could have done our mutual aren’t-we-tough-minded high-fiving and back-slapping just as an aside to Charles, I would have. So, sorry, everyone.”

Argh…you were just trolling and I took the bait. Damn you to the antipodes where you belong, Jones….

Substantively…I think I need to think more about whether I agree that it makes sense to see all those anti-torture arguments as utilitarian…but I’m waaaaay more comfortable debating whether utilitarianism is wrong than whether torture is wrong.

I definitely agree with you too that the debate about torture as it’s been staged, and particularly the ticking time bomb scenario, are mostly ways to make it acceptable to torture. One of the (many) horrible things the Bush presidency did was to make this a debate. Until Cheney et al. started using torture, there wasn’t a constituency for it, as far as I can tell. Now there is. Which is why Obama really needed to put those fuckers in prison…and why his failure to do so is really reprehensible.

Okay…thinking about this more…I’d say one problem with utilitarianism re torture is that I’m not sure it’s accurate. That is, I think when you’re using reason in the first place, it’s very difficult not to end up with some sort of consequentialist argument (especially if you reject intentions.) Utilitarianism and reason go together historically and systematically, I think. In some sense, once we’ve accepted your challenge to provide reasons, then we’ve accepted utilitarianism as the arbiter of the discussion.

But…is torture really wrong because it corrodes society or individuals, or because it’s a slippery slope? If you could torture someone with no consequences whatsoever (say no one would ever know, I guess), would torture then be okay? I don’t think it would be. Torture is wrong because it’s wrong, not because of its consequences. In fact, I think it’s the other way around; the consequences flow from the fact that the act is wrong. Sauron’s ring corrupts because it is evil; it isn’t evil because it corrupts.

Again, this puts you outside the utilitarian calculus, and therefore in a lot of ways outside reason. You start to get into the area where you’re talking about the state of your soul, or the state of your relationship to God. You could say I guess that to be moral you have to identify with the sufferer, not the torturer. You could say that the kind of moral community we are is one in which there is no torture. But again, those aren’t exactly reasons. They’re statements of faith, if anything.

Utilitarians would argue that faith can lead horrible places…which is certainly true. But the same can be said for reason, so I’m not really sure that the consequentialist argument can break the deadlock as to whether consequentialism is superior. I guess I would just point out that the experience of torture is at the heart of Christian morality, and that that feels more right to me than the idea of torture as just another point to be debated by varying factions. (And this in no way changes the fact that of course Christians have been as eager to commit torture as anybody else down through history, and very much up to the present moment.)

Noah wrote: “Hitler’s problem was not that he was historically backwards, for fuck’s sake. Besides the ridiculousness of pretending that what he did would have ever been okay, Nazism was absolutely, relentlessly modern.”

Noah, do you have any in-depth knowledge about the norms of war and conquest at various times during the past 3,000 years? By your scoffing, you sure don’t appear to.

The only difference with the Nazis and, say, the Romans or Mongols, is the Nazis had newer technology available to them.

Even so, there were plenty of past conquerors or empires whose brutality against those they attacked make Hitler’s look pale by comparison — ESPECIALLY if one looks at the deaths as a percentage of the existing populations of the era in question.

Genghis Khan and the Mongols indiscriminately killed far more people than Hitler ever did, and did so without bombs, tanks or gas chambers. Khan and his hordes routinely killed every living person — regardless of age or gender — and burned every building to the ground. By historical comparison, the Nazis were lightweights. Do a little research — you’ll be surprised.

The Romans also routinely sought to methodically wipe out whole cultures that were continuously troublesome to the empire — the Carthaginians and Gaels to name a few. And during the Jewish-Roman Wars, about two million Jews were killed. As a percentage of the total Jewish population of the world at the time, it is almost exactly the same percentage of world Jews killed by Hitler. The Carthaginians weren’t as lucky as the Jews or Gaels. After the final Punic War, they ceased to exist as a both a nation and a culture.

The fact is, there are countless examples in the past where scorched-earth tactics, genocide, wholesale enslavement, wholesale slaughter, etc. were common tactics during war.

That began to change after the Middle Ages, and by the 20th Century — especially after the widespread carnage of the American Civil War and WW I — most nations had begun to turn away from, or had totally rejected, such tactics.

I’m quite familiar with historical genocide, yes. I’m also familiar with Nazi ideology, and with the differences between twentieth century atrocities and past atrocities. It wasn’t just new technologies. It was new state organizations and new ideological approaches.

Atrocity isn’t modern in itself. But modern atrocities are modern. In the same way, it doesn’t make sense to say that the US is a throwback because Athens was a democracy.

Noah — I just can’t understand why you are so resistant to these facts about human behavior:

1.) General world views about what is and is not acceptable behavior against a fellow human has evolved over time.

2.) Not all countries or cultures have evolved their views at the same rate, and some continue to resist evolving at all.

These views also include things like acceptable behavior by combatants during war, definitions of torture, definitions of cruel and unusual punishment against prisoners, etc.

Among “civilized” nations, all of these definitions have changed dramatically during the past few hundred years.

And they are still evolving. For example, there are those who are now arguing that under relatively recent UN definitions of torture (which includes a vague definition of psychological suffering), solitary confinement is torture.

The fact is, Hitler’s version of warfare, and the treatment of those conquered or internally subjugated, was at odds with most contemporary nations in 1940. However, it would NOT have been considered all that unusual by most city states/empires worldwide during the reign of Julius Caesar.

Just a reminder that the US literally trained and backed fascist groups in Europe to torture and kill leftists after ww2 and are the joint fathers of the Golden Dawn. But that totally doesn’t count because *good intentions*

Noah, dude, when I imply that there is no argument to give torture a special intrinsic moral status, I’m trolling…but when you say you can’t give “exactly reasons” why we should give it such a status, but need to be “in a lot of ways outside reason” and utter “statements of faith”… I mean, yeah, if you’re going to say you can’t give reasons, then that’s where argument must cease and we resort to blowing raspberries at another. So: pffft.

Anyway, I really was shocked in 2003 NYC. If you’ve spent any time among philosophers, you’ll know that they calmly consider the most outrageous moral possibilities, but this felt different to me; it felt indicative of a broader shift in sentiment outside the faculty lounge. And that early on in the “war on terror”, to me as someone who didn’t identify with Manhattan, and was not American and had not been steeped in those 18 months (to that date) of national hysteria, it felt like a troubling sign. And it was a sign, and I was right to be troubled.

Pffft.

(PS: I wasn’t trolling qua trolling with the quote. The fact that it would piss people off was a merely foreseen but not directly intended side effect of using the quote, where my actual intention was just to high-five Charles, and therefore, via the doctrine of double effect it was morally permissible.)

(PPS: j/k. The doctrine of double effect is an anti-utilitarian principle deployed exactly to explain a supposed moral difference where a utilitarian would see none. Anscombe was a great defender of the doctrine, which is derived originally from Aquinas)

Noah, do you have any in-depth knowledge about the norms of war and conquest at various times during the past 3,000 years? By your scoffing, you sure don’t appear to.

Genghis Khan and the Mongols indiscriminately killed far more people than Hitler ever did, and did so without bombs, tanks or gas chambers. Khan and his hordes routinely killed every living person — regardless of age or gender — and burned every building to the ground. By historical comparison, the Nazis were lightweights. Do a little research — you’ll be surprised.

These are really ironic statements to have together since the second isn’t true in a single way at all, the mongol empire lasted nearly a hundred years and over that time period killed an estimated 700,000 people, many in open warfare, nazi Germany killed several orders of magnitude more than that through institutionalised killing alone, not even counting warfare.

I don’t think this narrative of warfare you’re trying to build works out R. Maheras. 20th century warfare was in many ways crueler and bloodier than 19th and 18th century warfare. Limited warfare was replaced by modern total warfare because of nationalism, improved technology and planning. WWII is kind of the height of that with the added nastiness of the modern ideologies of Nazism and Communism.

The smaller wars of the 20th and 21st century are also pretty nasty and better explained by factors like colonialism, nationalism and the Cold War than those places just being morally backwards. I can’t really see that the US behaved according to this supposedly loftier western standard of war in Korea and Vietnam nor the French in Algeria.

And of course in the past decade the US openly brought torture back in the prosecution of war but that has its antecedents in the Cold War and colonialism.

Not that I totally reject any modern moral progress, it has been very uneven though and in warfare those ideals get suspended anyway.

Argh…I mean I was joking about you trolling, not about the idea that rational argument may not be the way to resolve these issues.

I don’t think the only options are rational argument or raspberries…though, yeah, it makes sense that a utilitarian liberal modernist would think that. For me, on the contrary, it seems like there are rational reasons to think that sometimes reason isn’t necessarily the best moral guide in every situation.

I consider it a great source of shame that a colonialist motherfucker like the British Empire worked hard to outlaw practices such as the kurbash and then we go to war and start fucking implementing them left right and center.

Early Rome also allowed divorce and had some fairly progressive social laws, such as allowing various conquered nations to continue to practice their own religions. This changed over time to a more ‘burn the infidel’ stance. And yet sometimes back again and forward and back.

Poking around just quickly, I’ve seen various numbers…which suggests fairly strongly that people aren’t really sure how many the Mongols killed.

I’m not really sure what the point of the argument is exactly, though. As I said, there were lots of atrocities in the past. With modern technology and state controls, people were able to commit atrocities more efficiently and kill more people in a shorter period of time (the Mongols had a good bit longer to commit their atrocities, whatever way you look at it). In addition, modern ideologies are modern — the Nazis were pro-technology and new military techniques and post-Darwinian accounts of race. People have always been horrible to each other, but that doesn’t mean that folks who are horrible to each other now are throwbacks, while those who are forward-looking are nice. Progress can be its own ideology of murder, just as can conservatism.

Ormur — I never said World War II or other post WW I conflicts weren’t sometimes as bad, or worse, than what came before. All I’m saying is that general attitudes about the treatment of combatants and non-combatants had shifted markedly for most allegedly civilized nations.

Even the Nazis, for the most part, followed the tenets of the Geneva Convention, and despite all of their other atrocities, never resorted to the combat use of poison gas.

Such restraint would have been unusual 2,000 years ago, where captured opposing troops were routinely slaughtered to the last man, or made permanent slaves; and any means available were used against rival city states to totally destroy them or bring them to their knees.

Even less than 1,000 years ago, the Mongols usually killed every single person they didn’t use as slaves, regardless of their gender or age; and they routinely and indescriminately burned cities, towns and crops to the ground.

Even torture, which was once prevalent worldwide, had been curtailed dramatically by most countries when World War II rolled around.

Of course, because of today’s PC mindset, if one reads the Wikipedia entry on torture, one would come away thinging that torture was widely only by Western Nations. But the fact is, many cultures in Asia, Africa and the Americas had a history of routine and brutal torture (and, in some cases, cannibalism) long before they every met any Europeans.

Noah — This all started with your assertion that everyone has “good intentions” — even Hitler.

I disagreed, because in the context of history circa 1940, Hitler’s actions were out of step with what was the general norm among nations from that era. In short, they were not “good intentions.”

Progress, as you point out, does indeed change things. But Hitler went retro with his actions, and was at odds with what was then considered acceptable behavior among civilized nations.

And while America and its allies did kill innocent civilians during bombing campaigns, back during that era, it was impossible to fight a war without doing so. In Japan, for instance, while there were actual factories building some of the war materials and equipment, the Japanese had de-centralized the vast majority of its defense industry into small workshops and buildings scattered throughout populated areas. So the only way to cripple its war-making ability was to make incendiary bombing raids on large portions of a city.

Was this justified? Well, it depends on how one looks at it, doesn’t it? We didn’t start the war, and we were fighting a fanatical and ruthless enemy who had used scorched earth tactics in China, the Philippines, and elsewhere, and routinely fought to the last man. So we had “good intentions” and were seeking to end the war the quickest way possible to prevent even a higher number of military and civilian casualties.

On the other hand, the Japanese invaded sovereign countries throughout the Pacific and Asia simply to annex them and their resources — something that was, by that point in history, “bad form” for a civilized nation to do circa 1940.

That’s why during WW II, the Japanese were considered the bad guys, and the US and its allies were considered the good guys.

Wait a second. What do you mean “good intentions are about internal states of mind”?

It’s often obvious what someone’s intentions are based on verbal and non-verbal actions, and/or written statements.

For example, if someone says let’s negotiate, and then they do everything in their power to make such negotiations impossible, they obviously do NOT have good intentions.

Prior to Germany’s invasion of Poland, Hitler lied through his teeth as he slowly gobbled up the countries around him through coercion, intimidation and shows of military force. There was nothing internal about any of that, yet Prime Minister Chamberlain (a conservative, no less) and other European leaders chose to overlook the obvious, hoping Hitler would adhere to the “accepted international standards” of the day (standards which, by the way, were far different just a century or so earlier).

As I stated before, the only difference between good and evil during a given era in history is “good intentions” and “bad intentions” – intentions based on the accepted moral norms of that time period.

The reason America had a Civil War is because the South insisted on perpetuating slavery long after it had ceased to be part of accepted international standards.

But 2,000 year earlier, slavery was an accepted international standard in almost every continent, and in almost every culture.

You can sometimes tell what people are doing from what they say. But intentions are still internal. Hitler thought he was doing good by wiping out the jews.

Intentions are based on what a person thinks in their head. Moral norms of the time are a separate issue. Saying that one is the other is an idiosyncratic approach which I think confuses more than it clarifies.

“For example, if someone says let’s negotiate, and then they do everything in their power to make such negotiations impossible, they obviously do NOT have good intentions.”

See, this seems confused to me. Good intentions doesn’t mean that you do what you say. It means that your intentions are good; that is, you’re working towards the good.

There are situations where you might think that the means justify the ends. If killing people can be done for good reasons (presuming you think it can, since you’re not a pacifist) then lying can be done for good reasons.

Hitler lied because he thought it was best for Germany and the world if Germany expanded and destroyed Jews. He was willing to do various things in the name of that which you might call immoral. But those things are immoral because they’re immoral, not because Hitler’s intentions were bad from his own perspective.

I think the good intentions are a red herring. You don’t really mean anything by that, right? You’re just arguing for international norms as a standard. In other words, you’re a relativistic liberal. Which is a popular position…but I hold to the more conservative notion that right and wrong aren’t up for vote by the UN general assembly (though of course the UN does a lot of good in the world.)

To speak of the Geneva Convention, it isn’t some binding, everlasting inherent property of modernity – it’s just a set of rules its participants agree to follow, an agreement made in the 20th century. Adherence to the Geneva is a modern development, and if a country with enough sway were to, ah, find differences with it, and deem the treaty or the idea of international cooperation outdated… well, that’ll’ve been modern development as well. That’s the trouble with agreements (or “rights,” for that matter): they’re only worth what we’re willing to invest in them.

I mean, what is progress, really? Is it the sum dynamic of changes and development of society over time… or is it just a semantic thing that we consider progress only the changes in society that inspire warm feelings? Hurm, must investigate further… In any case, talk of human progress in this way must account for human nature, which is a constant. I mean, it ain’t like there be something in the water that we is all drinking today that makes us so radically different from people in the past, right? Human (and by extension popular) action and sentiment, are driven largely by circumstance not the mere march of time. Recognising this, one may better grasp exactly how it was that such thoroughly advanced country like Germany, with its rich philosophical tradition, no less, could in the 20th century put their confidence in a fascist party and leader that believed that believed irradiating Jewish people (among others) would somehow benefit the human race. I think it’s nowhere as simple as just Hitler being “historically backwards.” So the idea that the Holocaust was anything other than quintessentially modern is…not a plausible line of argument to me.

Let’s take the example of slavery. Is slavery really a “barbaric” practice, or is that just being unfair to barbarians of societies past? I’d argue that the slavery practiced in the Atlantic Slave Trade in the 19th century was intrinsically modern for its time, versus slavery of a past civilisation like, say, Ancient Egypt. Its implementation and methodology, even its philosophical and scientific justifications were all updated for the time. Going back to torture, then – torture isn’t a modern phenomenon, nor an ancient phenomenon…it’s a human phenomenon. Fact.

Here’s notorious peacenik Robert McNamara on WWII:
“LeMay said, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”
That’s from “Fog of War.”

“Good intentions” might mean (a) that the agent intends to do what is morally right by her own standards or (b) that the agent intends to do what is, so to speak, objectively morally right. Thus someone might act with good intentions in sense (a) but not in sense (b). Furthermore, an intention is an internal mental state which we attribute on the basis of observed behaviour (verbal and non-verbal).

Russ is using it in sense c, though, to mean the agent intends to do what is right by the consensus of the international community. Or I guess that’s what he means. At which point the use of “good intentions” seems more confusing than helpful. Or so it seems to me, anyway.